I have a question,
I sent a picture of a unique [product] and they sent back an email saying that they would like to manufacture it and when I said mine they corrected me by stateing ours.
is this normal?
How should I deal with them.
how does something like this work?
Thanks

We get this type of question shockingly often. Usually, it comes from someone who just returned from China calling to say that they just spent the last week in China, meeting with a whole slew of potential Chinese manufacturers, and they just realized (oftentimes by having read one of our blog posts on the need for a Non Disclosure Agreement) that they should have required the potential manufacturers to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement BEFORE showing them their product or prototype.

So what can be done? How should this company deal with their manufacturer? How can this company protect its trade secrets now? With this particular company, all may not be lost. and that is why I struck its specific definition of their product and replaced it with the generic word, “product.”

If this company provided its product to just one manufacturer and is now planning to buy from just this one manufacturer, this company may end up doing just fine.

What this company should have done BEFORE it showed its unique product to anyone in China (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) is to have required that Chinese manufacturer to sign a comprehensive NNN Agreement written in Chinese and tailored for enforceability in China. But that was not done, and the question is what can this company do now that it has returned without a China NDA of any kind.

This company can and should go to this particular Chinese manufacturer and say something along the following:

We want you to manufacture our product, but for that to happen, we need you to sign this OEM Agreement.

The OEM Agreement this company provides to its chosen Chinese manufacturer should contain each and every trade secret provision that should have gone into the NNN Agreement this company should have required the Chinese manufacturer to have signed before showing the Chinese manufacturer anything. If the Chinese manufacturer signs the OEM Agreement, the company will have its trade secret protections. If the Chinese manufacturer refuses to sign the OEM Agreement, the company will have a big problem.

In our experience, Chinese manufacturers will virtually always sign a legitimate OEM Agreement containing trade secret protections becuase the Chinese manufacturer wants the manufacturing business. I would estimate that Chinese manufacturers sign our OEM Agreements around 98% of the time and those few times that they do not it is because they are not a legitimate company and they do not want to be bound by legitimate requirements. In other words, the Chinese manufacturer that refuses to sign an OEM Agreement does so because they intend to steal trade secrets or fail to deliver on their quality promises and they do not want to sign a contract that could effectively penalize them for doing so.

The much tougher problem is the company that comes back to the United States having shown its unique product to ten Chinese manufacturers. That company can get a protective OEM Agreement from just one or two of them (i.e. the ones whom it is going to use for manufacutering) and it will then always have a problem with eight or nine of them.

The real solution, however, is not to go to China without an NNN Agreement at the ready.

If you are seeking to have your product manufactured in China, I suggest you scour the following regarding NNN/NDA Agreements:

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We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy. More